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8 Communication Theory & Research
on European audience research from the 1970s onwards (Jensen and Rosengren,
1990; Alasuutari, 1999). Attention turned away from surveys of media use and
formal studies of gratifications and towards the sub-cultural context of reception
and the in-depth study of personal responses to particular media experiences.
The move represented rejection of manipulative applications of research in the
interests of media providers or would-be communicators, even where these were
public broadcasters. The results generally shed light on the numerous intercon-
nections between features of everyday life and media experience, indicating quite
a strong degree of audience determination, contrary to the traditional dominant
model. Some of the studies carried out showed the apparent anomaly of the
attraction of distant and unrealistic content (especially American), showing a
capacity for audiences to maintain a critical distance from the values of imported
content, while appreciating storylines and features of production. The general
proposition that content could be ‘decoded’ in ways different from the seeming
overt message was supported in many studies. Even so, the extent to which
audiences could be considered to be ‘in control of’ their own media experience
has remained more or less a matter of belief rather than demonstration.

Content and textual research

There is an inconsistency between the tenets of reception research and the basic
assumptions of the semiological tradition that held sway in Europe from the
early 1970s. The appeal of the latter had originally been its counterweight to the
counting and statistical analysis of the content analysis tradition offered as part
of the dominant paradigm. Content analysis treated the ‘meaning’ of media texts
as relatively unproblematic, at least where it concerned the origin, intention and
likely effect of messages. Semiology offered the means of uncovering latent or
hidden meanings, especially in respect of implicit ideology and ‘meta-themes’ of
content. Elements of Marxist or Freudian theory were also engaged in the inter-
pretation of content (Williamson, 1978). Work of this kind failed, however, to
make contact with the emerging ethnographic and reception schools and was
gradually marginalized. In its place, various forms of ‘discourse analysis’ were
developed that sought to combine systematic text analysis with alternative
modes of interpretation, taking account of the nature of ‘texts’, context of produc-
tion and use, etc.

The political economic versus the popular cultural perspective

The development of critical theory in Europe was affected at some point in time
by a growing gap between those who emphasized the determination of media
ownership on media structures and therefore eventually content and those who
focused more directly on the ideological tendencies in content that favoured the
status quo and the potential for popular resistance. In the end, the ‘culturalist’